Resurrection Girls

Posted on 16th October 2019

Author:

Ava Morgyn

Genre:

Young Adult/paranormal

Pages:

277

Format:

E-Book

Rating:

Description:

Olivia Foster hasn’t felt alive since her little brother drowned in the backyard pool three years ago. Then Kara Hallas moves in across the street with her mother and grandmother, and Olivia is immediately drawn to these three generations of women. Kara is particularly intoxicating, so much so that Olivia not only comes to accept Kara’s morbid habit of writing to men on death row, she helps her do it. They sign their letters as the Resurrection Girls.

But as Kara’s friendship pulls Olivia out of the dark fog she’s been living in, Olivia realizes that a different kind of darkness taints the otherwise lively Hallas women—an impulse that is strange, magical, and possibly deadly.

Review:

Olivia’s brother died three years ago, and her family has fractured. Then Kara and her family (mother and grandmother) move in. Kara claims that her family is cursed — but she is also writing letters to inmates on death row. She ropes Olivia into helping her out and they call themselves the Resurrection Girls.

Now two homes squared off across from each other, both vacant, for all intents and purposes. Both haunted by their own ghosts.

Nobody is more disappointed than me when a book I’m really looking forward to doesn’t hit the spot, and unfortunately this book is in that spectrum. I’d seen the cover months ago, and it looked and sounded super interesting. Sadly, the book just wasn’t my taste. Normally I’m all for slow paced books, but in this case it was really slow paced, and I just struggled with it on all levels. The book didn’t really seem to match the synopsis to me, it just felt really lack luster all around. I feel as if the book was aimless, just mostly meandering.

I suppose I will start with the plot. The plot I thought was going to revolve around these two girls, and a generational myth. But instead the book was mostly about getting into trouble and grief. And while I think that the ideas together were commendable, I’m not sure they really worked for me. If this book had solely been about grief, I think it would have worked really well for me, but there was a paranormal part of this book that felt really out of place. Everything else was so real, that those little moments were really distracting from what seemed to be the main point of the story.

Character wise, I liked Olivia fine. She was a bit of a boring character and was apparently only made interesting in terms of Kara coming and brining her out of her shell. But I really didn’t like Kara as a character at all. I found all the scenes with them not to my liking. There was just something that wasn’t sticking with me. I know this was touted as a partial generational myth story, but that took a backseat and felt like it was just randomly dropped into the story. Overall the story of Kara and her family didn’t work for me.

If the story had just been about Olivia and her family’s grief, and Kara a normal friend I think it would have worked a lot better. There was just a lot throwing me off with this book. I didn’t DNF it because I wanted to see where the author was taking the story. And the ending of it…well. Let’s say it was a strange ending, but also happy? I was all over the place with how I felt about this book. And it’s not in a good way.

As I’ve said previously the book was really slow. There didn’t seem to be any build up and it just jumped from one thing to another, and it really didn’t work for me. It was just not consistent enough for my liking, which is a shame because the writing in this book is actually good. I think the writing is great, it was just let down by ambition.

And really, I think that was the main problem here. Too much going on, and not enough actual substance to the characters or the plotlines. And that of course, is just my opinion.

The final act in a tragic lay we were now trapped in.

In the end, this was not the book for me. It was okay, but I’m glad I gave it a chance.